Due to a combination of luck, limited new book selection, and having trusted sources for new book recommendations, it has been a long time since I read a book and was left with the impression that it was, as a whole, a swing and a miss. I mean, I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow The Ninth, but I still enjoyed the book enough that I wouldn’t even call it a foul ball. It just wasn’t the home run I was expecting after reading the first book in the series. Pretty much everything else I’ve read over the last few years was a good choice, even if it gave me complex feelings, and I’m struggling to remember the last time I just did not like a book I’d picked up to read other than the notable exception of when I tried to force myself to read the Game of Thrones Series and literally threw one of the books away from me when I got to the Red Wedding bit because I was sick and tired of the constant “every decent person gets killed because ninety-nine percent of the world’s population are total bastards who will kill you given a chance and even the most pitiful motive.” I’m not a picky reader, by any means, nor do I restrict myself to only what I know I like, but I tend to wait for something to be recommended or look for certain signs in reviews before choosing to invest my time and that means I rarely spend my time on a book that I genuinely dislike.
Continue readingScience Fiction
Reading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 2
I wrote previously about how I started reading The Animorphs in the year 2024, but that was over two months ago and we’re many books further into the series. I feel like we should be approaching the halfway point soon, but that’s still almost two full months away. Right now, even though I’m a week ahead (as of writing this, anyway–I’m on schedule as this gets posted since I’ll be taking a week away to focus on reading Dune for a different book club), I feel like we should be much further along considering all of the stuff that has already happened. The Animorphs have time travelled twice, we’ve gotten two (comparatively) massive stories about characters from the past, we’ve learned so much about the universe of this series, and our poor protagonists have been traumatized so many times that they’re turned into hardened veterans in a way that is equal parts fascinating and equal parts horrifying. In a Youth series! I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a better portrayal of trauma and what it means to be a child soldier in any kind of fiction ever. Sure, I think the series would have benefited from some of the more modern knowledge about how trauma works and why it works that way, but I think this is still handling it all pretty well for a series largely created in the nineties.
Continue readingSpoiler-Filled Musings On The Locked Tomb Series By Tamsyn Muir
This post is going to be full of spoilers about the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, so you should probably avoid it if you plan to read those books or have been convinced to read them by any of my past reviews. I’m not going to be actively discussing spoilers or the plot specifically, just my overall thoughts on the series so far, but I realized while writing my review of Nona The Ninth that I couldn’t really talk about what happened in it, much less my thoughts about how it related to the previous books, without basically spoiling everything. So, now that you’ve been warned, I’m going to get to the good stuff.
Continue readingSpoiler-Free Thoughts About Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I’ve finally read Nona the Ninth, thereby completing as much of the Locked Tomb series (by Tamsyn Muir) as has been released. This one was SO MUCH easier to read than the last one, Harrow the Ninth since it wasn’t in second-person almost the entire time. This one stayed with one very limited and skewed perspective, but it was consistent and easy enough to figure out as I read. While there were definitely points where I struggled, it had more to do with getting into the right frame of mind than about the craft of the novel. There were also a few points where I felt a bit confused, but they were all clearly a design choice by Muir, meant to reflect the state of the protagonist. The story did a great job of laying things out, avoiding the timeline foibles of Harrow as well as the second-person narration ones, and I probably enjoyed this one the most in the series thus far. I’m incredibly interested to see where things go in the next book, as the Locked Tomb series draws to what seems like the close of this once-trilogy, and as all the things set up in Nona and the previous volumes finally pay off. There’s so much that got expanded upon or accentuated in Nona that I’m feeling almost rabid for the next volume and find myself feeling incredibly grateful that I’ve only come upon the series during what is supposed to be the year of the fourth book’s release.
Continue readingReading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 1
One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.
Continue readingHarrow The Ninth’s Narration Made For A Harrowing Read
There will be spoilers for Gideon The Ninth and Harrow The Ninth in this review, starting in the third full-sized paragraph. There will also be some minor hints at spoilers in the second full-size paragraph, so tread with caution.
Well, I finished Harrow The Ninth. You’re probably reading this a day after I wrote about my initial impressions of the second book in the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, but it has been two days since I wrote that. I was too busy on Friday to write a blog post during my breaks at work and then far too tired to write anything once I finished. So, since I was burned out, exhausted, mentally drained, depressed, and incapable of determining if anything would actually be fun, I decided to toss aside my reservations (and cautions) about reading Harrow the Ninth in my current mental state and dove in. Eight hours later, it was half past three in the morning and I’d finished the book. I didn’t exactly disassociate my way through the book, but I basically did. Time left no impression on me and not in the way that happens when I get sucked into a book most of the time. This was a new one for me. It wasn’t a negative experience or anything like that–I actually wound up liking Harrow the Ninth more than I thought I would–but I definitely wasn’t really in control of myself. I didn’t really feel like I could pull myself out of this weird mental state. Normally, I forget that I’m reading at all and don’t even think to stop. This time, I just couldn’t stop. It was like I lacked the agency to stop, which kinda fits with the whole “mild disassociation” thing I had going on.
Continue readingHarrow The Ninth Is Tripping Me Up
After many long weeks of putting it off, mostly to savor the anticipation but also because I started a book series, a TV series, and working my way through Dimension20, all on top of my usual pile of video games, podcasts, and YouTube series, I finally started reading Harrow the Ninth. I’ve had a lot of stuff to read or watch and I didn’t want to start on another book until I’d cleared some of that stuff off my to-do list, but I wound up getting into it because the past two weeks have been rough enough that I needed a NEW escape. Plus, I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth and hoped that I’d be able to boost my incredibly low mood from the past three weeks by giving myself a bit of a treat. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple, since the second-person narration [which ultimately served a very specific purpose] was a bit too much for me to handle going into the book. I think I made it through about five chapters on my first attempt before I felt just too worn out by the book addressing me to continue reading. I can tell the writer, Tamsyn Muir, is trying for some kind of effect, but I’m not sure what it is yet and I’m not sure that it’s working since all I’m getting from it is confusion. I can only hope that it will resolve soon or that I’ll get past how weird it feels to me. Generally speaking, it’s one of those things that, as a reader and a writer, I can see the author is going for something but I can’t tell whether its just not landing for me or if they’re not doing a great job of it.
Continue readingLife, Survival, and A Strange New World In Scavengers Reign
Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of Zelda. Halo. Nowadays, now that I’ve read more and seen more, it happens less frequently. Since I studied literature and storytelling, it is very easy to draw lines between things, to find the parallels and the threads that bind it all together since even the most original works still draw their ideas from a well of experiences and past media exposure. Once you know how to look, it gets easy to see echoes of the past in the stories of the present. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. All storytellers take the things they’ve seen, heard, or experienced and use them as fuel to power their creativity, taking it all and turning it into something new that still reverberates with their past influences. That is true of all stories, no matter what. Sometimes, though, the story being told brings in new things that inspire wonder if only because they’re just so different. Reading the first novel in The Stormlight Archive was one such experience like this. It was a fantasy world filled with creatures and basic worldbuilding conceits that were entirely unlike anything I’d seen before. An entire world that seemed to have developed from crustaceans’ and shelled creatures. Reading my first Discworld book had a similar effect, but for the method of storytelling rather than the worldbuilding. And now I’ve experienced it again, with the show Scavengers Reign.
Continue readingJohn Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society Is A Delightful Literary Treat
As part of my recent reading kick, I’ve absolutely blasted through a few John Scalzi books. Most of them are things I’ve read before, some to their completion and some only partially because I got distracted by life in 2020 and never picked them back up, but I’ve read some of his newer stuff as well. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Scalzi’s books is that they’re dependably enjoyable. If you like anyone one of them, you’ll probably like all the rest. He isn’t exactly the most progressive writer out there, but he is definitely on the right side of history, so there’s little to worry about beyond a few rather obvious lacks (in terms of representation, mostly) in his earlier books. His more modern stuff is better, in my opinion, but I feel like that’s true of just about any writer since we tend to age like fine wine rather than dairy products. Anyway, I’ve gotten away from the point I was planning to make. I recently read his Spring of 2022 book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and it was an absolute delight.
Continue readingChuck Wendig’s Wayward Felt Too Realistic To Be Called Hopeful, But That’s Still How I’d Describe It
Just as a note, there will be heavy plot spoilers for Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers since this blog post is about the sequal, Wayward. There will also be some spoilers for that, but not as many. The final end and major plot points of Wanderers will definitely come up, but I’ll be avoiding most of the plot of Wayward except for a few non-specific mentions here or there.
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